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Almost four years ago, NeoSmart Technologies published a Windows Vista repair and recovery CD that could be used to treat common boot issues and recover from catastrophic system failure in case you didn’t have a Windows setup CD handy.

Over the years, we’ve added more recovery CDs to the collection, ending up with a complete portfolio of repair CDs for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. We’ve had the good fortune of being able to host these CDs on our site in one form or the other for free download to millions of users around the globe.

Three months ago, we were contacted by the legal department at Microsoft Corporation asking us to discontinue hosting these files. Until this point, we were not aware that Microsoft was displeased with our hosting of the CDs and in fact enjoyed a rather healthy relationship with the Microsoft support forums where victims of PC crashes would be directed to our site to download a copy of the repair CDs.

Since then, we have been in talks and negotiations with the Microsoft legal and licensing divisions, trying to work out a method whereby we could provide our users and visitors with access to these CDs once again. Today we’re excited to announce that these CDs are once more available for download!

There’s some mixed good and bad news, however. The good news is that all downloads will be direct HTTP links, so no need to learn how to use a torrent client or fiddle around with open network ports: just plain, standard, direct, and very fast HTTP downloads for all our ISO images. We’ve also taken this opportunity to update the repair CDs and add a virus scanner (powered by ClamWin) as well as some command-line tools and utilities that were missing from some of the images.

The bad news is that there will now be a nine dollar download charge for each CD. There was no way for us to avoid charging this, as we now pay a licensing fee to Microsoft in exchange for making these CDs available, and also pay per download to outsource the high-speed web hosting for these large CD images (150 to 200 MiB, each) to an outside service.

We look forward to updating these repair and recovery CDs over time and adding more tools and utilities to help you save your PCs from the brink of death. We thank you for your patience with us over the past few months during which the downloads were suspended, and truly appreciate your understanding of the situation.

56 thoughts on “Windows Recovery Discs Updated, Reinstated”

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DeathToMSLawyers wrote:
“… the rest of the world would rather use buggy Ubuntu over your bloated, overpriced crap.”

If you don’t like Ubuntu, Just download LinuxMint 14 with the Cinnamon desktop environment, and then dual-boot into the ‘bloated, overpriced crap’ parition (the ‘derp’ partition?) only when you absolutely have to.

Well Ubuntu is quite fine, except that I didn’t like their “Unity” desktop but that is easy to fix… you can switch to the Ubuntu “classic” desktop very easily (Google for it).

I am trying to dual boot Ubuntu and Win7 in a new ASUS notebook I bought. After shrinking the Windows partition and creating new partitions for /, /boot and /home (which is my usual practice) Win-7 refused to boot (which was expected) and consistently blue-screened (was not really expecting that!). Had no choice but select the recovery option, which fired up some ASUS recovery tools, which spent about an hour to fix the windows C: drive ! 99% of that time is copying to the disk, which wasn’t necessary at all, it would have been a matter of running ‘bootrec.exe’ — if only I had created Win 7 Repair disks earlier ! Moral of the story to any users trying to dual boot is — create a Win 7 repair disk (Google for this) before you mess with the partitions. So remember to do that, and have fun with Ubuntu or Mint or whatever your choice is !

My daughters laptop has been having problems for quite a while, at times it wont start up and when it does is slow. The OS is vista 32bit home premium. I’ll be going over to visit her in Australia in September and wondered if taking this fix would help get it working for her again.

My husband was watching a movie on our laptop while out of town, had to leave for a moment, paused the movie came back and the laptop was frozen. He manually shut it down then received an error code of 0xc00000e9. This particular laptop is a Toshiba Satellite running Vista. I downloaded the recovery tool, ran it through the laptop but once it finished and I was able to choose which disc to repair it continued to tell me that it was corrupt. I could not do a system restore for the same reason. Do you have any suggestions on what to do next? Thank you.